AI spam, the latter day internet, force digg.com offline for now

19 March 2026

digg.com, social news aggregator, and once the front page of the internet, has closed its doors for the duration, and let a number of staff go, just months after officially relaunching.

digg* says an onslaught of AI agents, and automated accounts, are behind the decision, together with an internet, that in 2026, is different. That’s sure something a few of us can attest to.

And after a long time out of circulation, they’ve found making a comeback a little trickier than anticipated, according to a post presently on the site’s frontpage:

We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren’t just a moat, they’re a wall. The loyalty users have to the communities they’ve already built elsewhere is profound. Getting people to move is a hard enough problem. Getting them to move and bring their people with them is something else entirely.

The good news for those who had looked forward to digg’s return is the shutdown is meant to be short lived. In addition, original co-founder Kevin Rose, who helped revive the site, will shortly commence working at digg in a full time capacity. digg adherents can only hope his presence will help steady the ship in the waters that are today’s internet.

* according to digg’s Wikipedia page, the site’s name is stylised in lowercase. Just about all the references I could see featured an uppercase letter d. I’ve gone lowercase here, in the same way disassociated is stylised with a lower case d.

There is nothing irksome than styling disassociated with an uppercase d, and the same goes for digg.

Has the true identity of British street artist Banksy been revealed or not?

19 March 2026

Has the cover been blown on the true identity of British street artist Banksy?

Some people seem to think so. A British tabloid, The Mail on Sunday, claim they learned Banksy’s actual name in 2008, something that has — apparently — now been verified.

Banksy however, through his lawyer, disputes the finding, says Achol Arok, reporting on the story for The Daily Aus (Instagram link).

Assuming the latest reporting is correct, I’m surprised, with his remarkable profile, that Banksy has succeeded in concealing his actual identity for so long,

I imagine Banksy’s had help protecting this information hitherto, but the feat is impressive given the daring nature of his works, many in public places, often subject to much surveillance.

Buzzfeed facing bankruptcy after AI gamble unravels

19 March 2026

Victor Tangermann, writing for Futurism:

The company reported a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 in an earnings report released on Thursday. In an official statement, the company glumly hinted at the possibility of going under sooner rather than later, writing that “there is substantial doubt about the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”

This is distressing news. I knew a couple of former Sydney based Buzzfeed writers, and even visited the office on one occasion. Numerous media outlets are working with AI agents, but few are allowing them to run the news desk. I’m hoping Buzzfeed is able to work their way through this difficulty.

No sign of extraterrestrial life? Blame it on bad space weather

18 March 2026

In the search for evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, astronomers, and organisations like SETI, often seek out narrowband radio signals.

Space is full of radio signals, most of them broadband, which usually occur naturally. Neutron stars are but one generator of such signals. Narrowband radio transmissions, on the other hand, are somewhat more likely to be created by an intelligent civilisation. On Earth, for instance, TV transmissions and mobile phones, are among sources of narrowband radio signals.

It makes sense then to look out for such signals in deep space. But some recent research conducted by SETI suggests narrowband radio signals may be disrupted by chaotic flows of ionised gas, and other sources of turbulence in the cosmos:

A new study by researchers at the SETI Institute suggests stellar “space weather” could make radio signals from extraterrestrial intelligence harder to detect. Stellar activity and plasma turbulence near a transmitting planet can broaden an otherwise ultra-narrow signal, spreading its power across more frequencies and making it more difficult to detect in traditional narrowband searches.

We keep coming up with explanations to account for the apparent absence of intelligent extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the universe. Now we’re blaming the weather.

The smart money says there is intelligent life somewhere in the cosmos, but it may not be all that common, nor particularly close to us. There’s a lot of space out there, beyond the solar system.

The size of the galaxy, to say nothing of the universe, is something many of us struggle to comprehend. Even if humanity possessed the means to travel at speeds close to the velocity of light, it would take over four years just to reach Proxima Centauri, the star presently closest to the Sun.

To visit the centre of our galaxy, the journey would take over twenty-five thousand years.

That’s not insignificant. In fact, twenty-five thousand light years constitutes a vast amount of space. An alien civilisation could be tucked in there somewhere, but it might take thousands of years for evidence of their presence to become apparent.

On paper, the chances of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life are better than even.

There are potentially millions, if not more, of exoplanets with environments conducive to complex life in the Milky Way galaxy alone. And if intelligent life can take hold on Earth, it can surely take hold elsewhere. But there are those who think intelligent life on Earth is a fluke, and a lot of things had to go the right way, over a period of billions of years, for this to happen.

Bad “weather” in deep space may well be playing a part in concealing the presence of extraterrestrial technological civilisations. But their scarcity, and extreme distance — potentially tens of thousands of light years — from Earth, probably better explains why there is no sign, yet, of anyone else.

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astronomy, physics, science

Font Awesome cans renaming plans for Eleventy static site generator

17 March 2026

Proposals were afoot to rename Eleventy — often styled 11ty — a blog publishing platform favoured by some Indie/Small Web bloggers, as Build Awesome.

The awesome part of 11ty’s would-be new name derives from Font Awesome, producers of a wide range of icons website publishers can make use of. I’ve used their icons in the past, in place of the text menu items presently in the animated colour bar above the title of this post.

11ty was acquired by Font Awesome in September 2024.

To accompany the renaming, a Kickstarter campaign was, from what I can tell, launched to fund development of a more commercial “website builder” version of 11ty, while the original blog publishing platform would remain free to use.

But both the fund raiser, and renaming plans, have been paused after Font Awesome claimed only a handful of emails promoting the Kickstarter campaign had reached intended recipients.

A backlash by 11ty publishers against the renaming proposal however seems the more likely reason.

Even though 11ty creator Zach Leatherman joined Font Awesome at the time of the acquisition, the company appears to have completely misunderstood the veneration in which the blogging platform, as 11ty, is held by publishers. Why even consider changing the name of such a highly regarded product in the first place, and worse still contemplate something like Build Awesome?

The longlist for the 2026 Stella Prize literary award

14 March 2026

Twelve titles have been included on the longlist for this year’s Stella Prize, the Australian literary award recognising the work of women and non-binary writers.

58 Facets: On violence and the law, by Marika Sosnowski
Ankami, by Debra Dank
Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea, by Natalie Harkin
Cannon, by Lee Lai
Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An Encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family, by Micaela Sahhar
Fireweather, by Miranda Darling
I Am Nannertgarrook, by Tasma Walton
KONTRA, by Eunice Andrada
Memorial Days, by Geraldine Brooks
The Rot, by Evelyn Araluen
Wait Here, by Lucy Nelson
Wild Dark Shore, by Charlotte McConaghy

Graphic novelist Lee Lai, whose 2021 title, Stone Fruit, was nominated for the 2022 prize, returns to the Stella this year. Poet Evelyn Araluen, as foreshadowed by yours truly, is also included, with her latest work The Rot.

The Stella shortlist will be announced on Wednesday 8 April 2026.

Get listed in the 2026 Internet Phone Book

14 March 2026

The second edition of the Internet Phone Book is in the works, and publishers of personal websites are being invited to submit their URL.

I was stoked to be included in the inaugural edition, compiled last year by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and you can still call me on 492.

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blogs, books, publishing

If flip-phones can make a comeback, can Flash do the same?

7 March 2026

Bill Premo:

I don’t know where to start with this but yeah I’m making flash if flash was built in 2026. I’m making it compatible with Linux,Mac, and PC.

If you remember Flash, the animation/multimedia creation application, originally launched by a company called Macromedia, you were on, or near, the web in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

I did little with Flash itself, but dabbled with the somewhat similar Director, also originally a Macromedia product. I used to burn (quite amateurish) presentations onto CD-ROMS. But this was before both were acquired by Adobe.

Flash was — once — the gold standard for creating animations for the web, or for building interactive websites. But Flash had limitations. For one, anything Flash could not be viewed natively in a browser, and needed a plugin to be operative.

Security concerns eventually resulted in support for Flash being withdrawn by Apple, and later many web browsers. Flash was fun, and useful, for a short while, but after a time I refused to visit websites that were Flash powered.

The question in 2026 though; is the world ready for a potential Flash renaissance? If Premo is building Flash for 2026, then who knows. Maybe.

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animation, technology, web design

Hell hath no fury like an AI agent scorned

7 March 2026

Scott Shambaugh:

An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

If one AI agent can locate incriminating information about someone, and try to use it against them, it follows other AI agents will do the same.

The Rot, by Evelyn Araluen, wins 2026 Victorian Prize for Literature

2 March 2026

Naarm/Melbourne based Australian poet Evelyn Araluen has won both the Victorian Prize for Literature, and Prize for Indigenous Writing, in this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, for her second collection of poetry, The Rot.

Araluen won the Stella Prize, one of Australia’s major literary awards in 2022, for her debut poetry collection, Dropbear. Her win in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards surely puts The Rot in good stead to be awarded the Stella Prize again this year.

That would be quite the accomplishment. We’ll find out soon if the possibility is on the cards, when the longlist for the 2026 Stella is announced next week, on Wednesday 11 March 2026.

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